————————–English/ Who are you? Can you tell us in a few words what you have been doing these last few years?
Above all I’m a programmer and an engineer, having become an artist only of late. As a teenager in the 70’s, I taught myself how to program. As a student, I studied science in great depth, which led to me graduating as an engineer from Telecom Paris, and I put that training to use in the R&D departments of a number of different companies, including Act Informatique (Act Computer Science) in Paris (a real beehive of activity) and most importantly NeXT with Steve Jobs in Silicon Valley. Simultaneously, at the end of the 80’s, I was discovering the art world, through collaborations that brought together art and technology (Jacques Serrano, Alberto Sorbelli, Chris Marker, etc.), and that was a real turning point for me. Since I believe in action, I decided to become an artist, in the middle of the 90’s. Since then, I have led two parallel lives: I’m a highly specialized freelance programmer, and I’m an artist. Two lives that come together in the design world when I’m designing the behavior of sensitive objects for the company Violet (Nabaztag, Dal, etc.).

// You have been involved in network activities or netbased projects for many years. From an artistic perspective, what has been happening in this field? What have you witnessed or found interesting about the internet? What is your experience and feeling about the birth and the adolescence of the internet?
Surprisingly, when I worked for NeXT, it was mainly on technology that was similar to the web (which hadn’t yet been invented). When www. came out, we dropped our proprietary research and adopted the protocols that were spreading. It was at that time that I decided to become an artist, so I followed and supported early online artwork (Just From Cyntha by Alberto Sorbelli, etc.). After that I was more a spectator than a player in Internet art, above all because I was more interested
in the “active” aspect of computers than in the “communication” aspect. I did, however, do a few programmed series online, but I didn’t work with the Internet as a subject, nor as a material in and of itself. I used Internet above all to disseminate and show my programmed artwork (because a surfer’s terminal is a computer that allows my programmed works of art to operate via the navigator).
/// From a social, political, artistic or philosophical point of view, what is the impact of the concept of the network? How has the Internet and the idea of the network modified your attitude and practice, your relation to space and time, and the way we behave, work, think, share, exchange, collaborate, create…?

I believe that programming as an artistic material is radically new as compared to previously used materials, due to its essence of ‘action’. When you program, you’re crafting a future action. This is radically new in the realm of fine arts. It’s rich and fresh. Nevertheless, my artistic work isn’t an expression of that fact. I do in fact use “programmed objects” in most of my pieces, but it’s above all to challenge the terms of human freedom in a complex world. So Internet has probably changed the world— I believe quantitatively rather than qualitatively— because it’s a matrix for instantaneous multimedia communication, but what I’m interested in, is the fact that Internet works on computers (servers and terminals alike), and the fact that these computers allow programs to operate, programs which do things. It may not be very visible as yet, but Internet has disseminated process-oriented thinking: today, everyone makes use of, calibrates or writes programs, whether they’re inserting tools on their blog, calibrating widgets on Netvibes or programming applications on an iPhone. Internet has popularized a tool that was once reserved only to specialists, just as the printing press popularized writing. For me, the radical difference of the Internet medium from other media resides in this active dimension; when we compare those media to Internet today, they seem to be more and more static and passive.

//// In the future, do you think internet will still be an interesting territory to explore ? Do you think it can be a fertile space for creation? Do you think it will produce interesting, mutating, hybrid artistic forms where the physical world and the virtual world can mutate, merge, fuse or collide?

Again, what’s so powerful is that Internet is not only a medium, but an operating universe. And that universe is made up of data which can be manipulated by programs which anyone can write. So we’ve got a programmable universe. A universe that overlaps more and more with the real world of atoms and cells, in both directions. Therefore, due to this contact, it’s reality that is becoming more and more programmable. It’s a revolution in fine arts as well as in all artistic practices (literature, cinema, etc.), but also in non artistic areas
(politics, sociology, ecology, etc.). It’s rich, tremendously rich because no material is as versatile as programming, and it’s in its gestation period (and thus potentially dangerous). So it’s very exciting, the future is wide open.